A comparison between statistical and Walrasian approachesan application to a labour market

Resumo

The Walrasian construction of the tatonnement constitutes the inner core of the neoclassical paradigm. Despite being a satisfactory one in many cases, there are several real-world phenomena which cannot be critically appraised under this approach. We argue that the Walrasian understanding of the market implicitly limits the scope of problems that can be analysed within the paradigm. The statistical markets approach, first developed by Duncan Foley, aims at offer a distinct perspective when analysing economic interactions through the abandonment of methodological individualism. We draw a critical comparison between the two approaches in the context of a labour market. We express the same market configuration under the two approaches, thus ensuring a higher degree of comparability between the two. We check whether their predictions are similar in a number of cases, stressing those features that exclusively pertain to the statistical approach that, in our opinion, enhance the theoretical appraisal of economic activity in contemporary societies.